Chic Young

Murat Bernard "Chic" Young (January 9, 1901 – March 14, 1973) was an American cartoonist who created the popular, long-running comic strip Blondie. His 1919 William McKinley High School Yearbook cites his nickname as Chicken, source of his familiar pen name and signature. According to King Features Syndicate, Young had a daily readership of 52 million. Stan Drake, who drew Blondie in the 1980s and 1990s, stated that Young "has to go down in history as one of the geniuses of the industry."

Born in Chicago, Illinois, Young began drawing with the encouragement of his mother, who was an artist. Although his father James was a shoe salesman who didn't think much of artists, all of the children in the family were creative: Walter was a painter, daughter Jamar entered the commercial art field and Lyman, Chic's older brother, drew the Tim Tyler's Luck comic strip for King Features. It was Lyman who spurred Chic to constantly draw.

Chic Young grew up in a German-Lutheran neighborhood on the south side of St. Louis. After graduating from high school in St. Louis, he returned to Chicago where he worked as a stenographer while taking night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1921, he learned that the Newspaper Enterprise Association was seeking an artist to do a comic strip about an attractive young woman. He headed for Cleveland and earned a salary of $22 a week while drawing The Affairs of Jane about a struggling film actress who dreamed of graduating from low-budget pictures to stardom. The short-lived strip, which began in 1921 on Halloween, came to a conclusion five months later on March 18, 1922. In the NEA art department, Young worked near cartoonist Gene Ahern, and the two often played pranks on each other. When a call came from King Features' J. Gortatowski offering an annual salary of $10,000, Young thought it was a prank and turned down the job. Looking for work later, he applied to Gortatowski and learned the call was legitimate.

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